Valentine's Day with the Creative Class

My Valentine's Day Book Review in the new Washington Examiner:

On St. Valentine's Day, Washington's fancy turns from political strategy to biological imperatives. So how does D.C. rank as a place to find Mr. or Ms. Right?

In Cities and the Creative Class, George Mason University professor Richard Florida doesn't concentrate much on l'amour -- but he does provide ample statistical evidence that the Washington area abounds in eligible singles and in classy places for romantic dates.

The region ranks high in the kinds of people Dr. Florida believes drive prosperity: the well-educated, software programmers, technology entrepreneurs and the like. Plus, Washington offers the arts, culture, and ethnic bistros ideal for dating.

In the District itself, not all the good ones are taken. According to my own research, D.C. residents --of whom only 9 percent voted for President Bush -- were much less likely to be married than the citizens of any state. During the 27 years from age 18-44, the average black woman in D.C. could expect to be married an average of only 3.9 years. This compares to 5.4 years in Pennsylvania, the worst-ranking state.

Likewise, the deeply Democratic 18-44 year old white women of D.C. average merely 7.4 years of marriage -- compared to 12.2 in the bluest state, Massachusetts, and 17 in the reddest state, Utah.

Gary Brecher A-Go-Go

Latest War Nerd Column: "Togo's Lo-Cal Coup" - The War Nerd laments the decline of the African coup.

Black-African coups generally specialized in drama and big talk, not high casualties. Lots of times, the officers planning the coup took advantage of foreign visits by the head of state to stage their pint-size revolution. It was really easy to do that back in the 60s, when Africa was still considered cool, revolutionary and "developing" -- before people realized it was developing like a case of smallpox, not like Singapore.

Back then African dictators were superstars of the commie media, like Che. So when Kwame Nkrumah, the dashiki-wearing dictator of Ghana, went to Hanoi to chill with the revolutionaries in 1966, his officer corps decided to pull off a little revolution. Kwame had no dictatorship to come home to, and ended up one of those depressed ex-dictators who never shut up about their glory days.

Mausoleum of Modern Art

Robert Locke's magisterial review of the new Museum of Modern Art building in NYC, "Mausoleum of Modern Art," and of the entire course of moder art, from the 1/17/05 American Conservative is now online.

He'll never get on the Oscar stage for his acting

Maybe I will watch the Oscars this year - As long as they don't fire Chris Rock from his job as host for saying things like:

"I never watched the Oscars. Come on, it's a fashion show," Rock recently declared. "What straight black man sits there and watches the Oscars? Show me one!"

What will Rock be wearing to the show?

"Nothing against people who aren't straight, but what straight guy that you know cares?

Thinking About Imprisonment

Does Discrimination Cause Imprisonment Difference? One of my most distinguished readers writes:

There have been several studies to test the proposition that the high percentage of blacks in prison is produced by the police over-arresting, or prosecutors over-prosecuting, blacks. This theory is not true, as we can discover by using the National Crime Victimization Survey, which asks victims for the race of their offender in robbery and assault cases. The percentage of blacks involved in these crimes, according to the victims, matches almost exactly the percentage of blacks in prison for those crimes. These studies have been done by, among others, Alfred Blumstein at Carnegie Mellon University.

Chess in Our Iraqi Democracy

What's the deal with Sistani and chess? As you probably know, the Grand Ayatolla bans chess-playing. I figured it was because of the residual idolatry inherent in playing a game with little men, but now, via Colby Cosh, comes word from Sistani that composing and solving chess problems is OK. So, what's the real reason "playing a chess" is verboten?

UPDATE: One cynical reader reminisces:

Having worked in Saudi for three years starting 19XX as a tech rep for XXX, I think the problem with chess is that it requires thinking. The most comment complaint from my young Saudi Arabian Army students was, "Teacher, don't make me use my think." The last thing a Saudi leader wants is thinking.

International Man of Mystery Ahmed Chalabi

Your tax dollars at work: Suspected Iranian agent Ahmed Chalabi is challenging Ayatollah Sistani's brother-in-law Ibrahim Jafari for the post of Prime Minister of Iraq. I've often asked what is the source of Chalabi's appeal to the elites he comes in contact with (whereas commoners who know him only from his record -- embezzling millions in Jordan, lying the U.S. into the War in Error, possibly handing U.S. secrets over to the Iranian intelligence agency, etc. -- generally hold him in contempt). I've hypothesized in the past that Chalabi must somehow possess Rasputin-like sexual magnetism, but that seems unlikely.

The simplest explanation for Chalabi's appeal to insiders points to that $100,000,000 of the U.S. taxpayers' money that the U.S. government has given him over the years, much of which remains unaccounted for. You can make yourself a pretty doggone popular guy in Washington and Baghdad for just a fraction of $100,000,000. But it could turn out to be a very good investment on Chalabi's part, since Iraq's oil reserves are worth trillions.

"Radical" AIDS strategy?

Public Health 101 Finally Considered for AIDS: "Gays Debate Radical Steps to Curb Unsafe Sex" claims the NYT:

While many are calling for a renewed commitment to prevention efforts and free condoms, some veterans of the war on AIDS are advocating an entirely new approach to the spread of unsafe sex, much of which is fueled by a surge in methamphetamine abuse. They want to track down those who knowingly engage in risky behavior and try to stop them before they can infect others.

It is a radical idea, born of desperation, that has been gaining ground in recent months as a growing number of gay men become infected despite warnings about unsafe sex...

Although gay advocates and health care workers are just beginning to talk about how this might be done, it could involve showing up at places where impromptu sex parties happen and confronting the participants. Or it might mean infiltrating Web sites that promote gay hookups and thwarting liaisons involving crystal meth.

Other ideas include collaborating with health officials in tracking down the partners of those newly infected with H.I.V. At the very least, these advocates say, gay men must start taking responsibility for their own, before a resurgent epidemic draws government officials who could use even more aggressive tactics.

There is nothing "radical" about "tracking down the partners of those newly infected" -- that's how governments have handled syphilis for generations, which is one reason syphilis is so much less prevalent than HIV these days. Indeed, the NYT article eventually gets around to admitting that this is "radical" only in the sense that standard operating procedures was not applied to the AIDS epidemic due to the political clout of gays, who valued their own sexual pleasure over not killing other gays.

Whether such ideas gain acceptance, the fact that activists are even thinking about curbing gay sexual freedom is a huge shift.

In the early years of the AIDS epidemic, gay men protested attempts to close down bathhouses and strenuously opposed efforts by health officials to trace those infected with the virus. Until now, those advocates, driven by concerns about privacy and the stigma associated with the disease, have successfully fought off efforts to impose a traditional public-health model for tackling the spread of the virus...

Those frustrations were given voice in November by Larry Kramer, the playwright and activist who himself has AIDS, in a widely discussed speech at Cooper Union in which he criticized gay men for their behavior. "You are still murdering each other," he said then. "Please stop with all the generalizations and avoidance excuses gays have used since the beginning to ditch this responsibility for this fact."

Hey, Larry, they can smell fear

More bribes no doubt on the way: "Some of Harvard's Leading Professors Confront Its President," reports the NYT on a Harvard faculty meeting: "

Most speakers took aim at Dr. Summers for what they described as an autocratic management style that has stifled the open debate that is at the core of the university's values.

Huh? As I recall, open debate over why among the best people in the hard sciences, men vastly outnumber women, got stifled awfully fast, and not by Summers but by the forces of political correctness.

Of course, Summers immediately caved in and promised reparations. Expect him to pony up more of other people's money and other people's opportunities to save his job.

*

Here's a link to Steven Pinker's full article on The New Republic: THE SCIENCE OF DIFFERENCE: Sex Ed:

Anyone who has fled a cluster of men at a party debating the fine points of flat-screen televisions can appreciate that fewer women than men might choose engineering, even in the absence of arbitrary barriers. (As one female social scientist noted in Science Magazine, "Reinventing the curriculum will not make me more interested in learning how my dishwasher works.")

That killer quote is from Patti Hausman, who is fascinated by how so many males are interested in 3-d thinking, something that she says has zero interest for her.

Where the bodies are buried

Whose unexpurgated memoirs would you most like to read? I'd put Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to Washington, close to the top of the list. His is a pretty amazing life story -- his mother a part-black servant girl (slave?) impregnated by a prince, yet he rose up from this lowly beginning to become the most successfully manipulative ambassador of his era. I bet he has stories to tell. Sadly, I suspect he'll take them to the grave.

Douglas Feith visits a Muslim democracy

Maybe Muslim Democracy Isn't Such a Hot Idea After All: After endlessly pushing former Israeli Housing (i.e., West Bank Settlement) Minister Natan Sharansky's book about how democracy will save the Muslim world, the Wall Street Journal Editorial Page gets around to sending one of their senior writers, Robert L. Pollock, to visit an actual working Muslim democracy, Turkey, and is aghast: "The Sick Man of Europe--Again: Islamism and leftism add up to anti-American madness in Turkey:"

"On a brief visit to Ankara earlier this month with Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith, I found a poisonous atmosphere--one in which just about every politician and media outlet (secular and religious) preaches an extreme combination of America- and Jew-hatred that (like the Turkish artists) voluntarily goes far further than anything found in most of the Arab world's state-controlled press. If I hesitate to call it Nazi-like, that's only because Goebbels would probably have rejected much of it as too crude."

National Greatness at work?

Remember the Maine! Remember Hariri! I have no more idea who blew up the ex-Prime Minister of Lebanon than I know who or what blew up the U.S. battleship Maine in Havana's harbor in 1898. But we got into a war with Spain after the Maine blew up, and we may get into a war with Syria because Hariri got blown up.

Fortunately, look how well the Spanish-American war turned out for us. We idealistically gave Cuba its independence, and the government of Cuba hasn't been a problem for either us or its own people ever since. We didn't give the Philippines their independence, and we only had to kill 200,000 Filipinos to make that stick. And we made Puerto Rico part of the U.S., letting any Puerto Rican move here, and the South Bronx is known worldwide as a synonym for utopia.

The collapse of kids on bikes

The Conservative Case Against Sprawl by law professor Michael Lewyn is a frank discussion of how government policy wrecked the cities.

On a side note, the decline in bicycle riding by kids is one of the unmentioned disasters of our time. Nowadays, I almost never see adolescents on bikes, due to parents' safety concerns about traffic and crime. I got hit by a car while riding when I was 13, but was back on my bike in a couple of days. This increases the chauffeuring burden on mothers, which depresses the birth rate.

Sam Francis, RIP:

A reader writes:

Free Republic pulled the Sam Francis RIP thread there tonight......what a surprise.

"Million Dollar Baby" with Spoiler Alert

Clint Eastwood's "Million Dollar Baby" -- An excerpt from my review in the Jan. 31st issue of The American Conservative:

Clint Eastwood's sentimental, old-fashioned boxing movie "Million Dollar Baby" arrived accompanied by such a chorus of critical hosannas that, sadly, moviegoers have little chance to discover its modest pleasures for themselves.

Despite Eastwood's limited gifts as a visual artist (which aren't helped by his being such a tightwad of a producer), reviewers worship him as a director because his 25 films are readily analyzable within the auteur theory, that system of intellectualized hero worship espoused by critics to make film history seem less chaotic than it really is.

In "Million Dollar Baby," Eastwood directs and stars as a grouchy Irish Catholic widower with the standard-issue heart of gold. Each morning, before checking in at The Hit Pit, the dilapidated L.A. gym he owns, he attends Mass to ask forgiveness for somehow driving away his only daughter.

The film is narrated portentously by the gym's wise and saintly old black janitor, played by -- you guessed it -- Morgan Freeman. This superb actor has long complained that, although he first broke through as a vicious pimp in 1987's "Street Smart," the public now won't let him play anything besides what Richard Brookhiser calls the "Numinous Negro." But he has only himself to blame for taking this role, a near-parody of the overly familiar Morgan Freeman Character.

Then, a perky Irish-American waitress, who is conveniently missing a father, shows up at the gym and asks Eastwood to train her. After some gruff dismissals, Eastwood finally takes her on and turns her into the #1 Contender, but the heartwarming main story is the father-daughter bond they forge.

Willowy starlet Hillary Swank, an Oscar-winner for "Boys Don't Cry," isn't exactly convincing as a boxer (the fight scenes appear to be shown in slightly fast motion to make her look quicker), but her exuberant presence is a delight. We never learn why such a cheerful, attractive lady wants to beat up other women because, when the ham-fisted script by Paul Haggis isn't telegraphing its emotional roundhouse punches, it's leaving much else unexplained.

In reality, women's boxing is a pseudo-feminist trashsport that briefly flourished in the 1990s when impresario Don King noticed that Mike Tyson fans got some kind of weird kick out of preliminary catfights between battling babes...

Female fisticuffs have faded recently due to the supply side problem of finding enough low-cost opponents for the handful of women stars. While the number of male palookas who will fight for next to nothing in the hope of becoming Rocky Balboa is ample, managers needing fresh meat for their female champs to bash frequently have to hire hookers and strippers to take dives -- and working girls don't work for free.

"Million Dollar Baby" simply ignores all this and asks you to believe that women's boxing today is a thriving duplicate of the men's fight game of a half century ago, which allows Eastwood to make a 1955-style boxing movie.

This offers some almost-forgotten payoffs, but Eastwood doesn't have the courage to make a genuinely out-of-fashion film.

Spoiler Alert:

When his protégé gets her neck broken by a dirty fighter, she asks him to kill her rather than make her live as a quadriplegic. His priest explains the Church is utterly opposed to euthanasia, which in a 1955 movie would have been the end of it. If, however, "Million Dollar Baby" had concluded with Eastwood's character helping her to find some new meaning in her life, as Christopher Reeve's wife did for the "Superman" star, the reviewers would have lambasted it as TV movie-fare. So, to the wild applause of the critics, he poisons her.

But the obvious question is left hanging: without his surrogate daughter to care for, what meaning will his life have for him?

Arthur Miller and capitalism

Arthur Miller, RIP: Colby Cosh says it best:

When I think about the man who wrote plays about how capitalism thwarts human aspirations, [got rich off them], and then got married to Marilyn Monroe, I'm afraid about all I can do is giggle.

Walls

James Q. Wilson sums it all up:

The great achievement of Western culture since the Enlightenment is to make many of us peer over the wall and grant some respect to people outside it; the great failure of Western culture is to deny that walls are inevitable or important.

Gay Germ Theory

Thrasymachus interviews Greg Cochran about his Gay Germ theory